For many, it's kiss and ail at Stanford

STANFORD, Calif. - It is minutes to midnight. A sultry full moon hangs over Stanford's Memorial Church, bathing the campus's red roofs and adobe-toned walls.

In the Quad, thousands of students mill around, some bobbing drunkenly, some giggling nervously, most of them wearing clothes.

Finally, a male senior saunters over to a group of the youngest-looking women and asks: "Hey! You freshmen? Can I kiss you?"

As the Stanford Band plays and a giant screen shows famous movie clutches, the bravest women step forward and receive the traditional welcome to one of the nation's most prestigious universities: a big wet upperclassman smack.

Days later, another tradition arrives. Flu and mononucleosis sweep the dorms.

A sanctioned event

Full Moon on the Quad is an event unique in U.S. education: an orgy of interclass kissing reluctantly but officially sanctioned

It is a domestic example of a new field in public health, "mass-gathering medicine."

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The best-known example of such policy is in Saudi Arabia, which has made multimillion-dollar efforts to keep the annual pilgrimage to Mecca as epidemic-free as possible.

For Stanford, the struggle is: Since officials can't outlaw it, how can they make it safer?

The first step, said Dr. Ira Friedman, director of the Vaden Student Health Center, is to make consent paramount.

"We try to create an environment in which they don't feel they must participate in the exchange of oral secretions," Friedman said. His center also offers shots against what it can fight: flu and meningococcal meningitis, a rare but sometimes dangerous infection known as "freshman meningitis."

'Peer health educators'

To make it safer, the evening is overseen by student sobriety monitors and decorated with hand-drawn signs - of the ilk that usually say "Beat Cal" but bearing slogans like "Consent is Sexy."

But the most crucial role is played by the "peer health educators" who live in each dorm.

They meet with freshmen before and ask any with cold symptoms to feel free to watch but not to kiss anyone. And they teach safe kissing.

From lore to reality

The event's origins are lost in the fog of history; legend holds that it began in the late 1800s with senior men presenting freshmen women with roses.

Later, it waxed and waned, reputedly practiced sometimes by some fraternities. Many graduates over age 40 have never heard of it.

In 1988, several student officers made it formal.

"It was folklore," said Julie Lythcott-Haims, one of those officers. "We took it off the shelf and dusted it off. We had roses, a string quartet, maybe some Champagne. A couple of hundred students showed up."

When she returned a decade later as an administrator (she eventually became the beloved "Freshman Dean Julie"), it had "become a thing," she said. "Thousands were showing up. It was crazy. It was wild. There were concerns about alcohol and safety."

Starting in 2002, deans debated outlawing it, rejected that as futile, and decided to impose order instead.

Now the quad is barricaded. Campus police check student IDs. Paramedics stand by. A concert is held so nonkissers have something to do.

It has been canceled only once: in 2009, the "pandemic swine flu" year.

Braving the odds

After East Coast schools, which open earlier, reported outbreaks, "we decided we couldn't live with the risk," Friedman said. "So we made a very unpopular decision."

Francisca Gilmore, a freshman then, said in an email from an internship in Cambodia that she and some classmates braved the odds. "Unofficially, a bunch of overeager freshmen and intoxicated upperclassmen gathered on the quad and upheld the tradition," she wrote.